Primary Care In The Twenty First Century

Quality is at the heart of the government's strategy for NHS development, and which is to be delivered through clinical governance. This book explores accreditation through practical case studies and research findings, and outlines how it can assure the quality of care. Systems of accreditation for measuring and improving quality are described, and show how they can be used easily and effectively to meet the challenges of the new NHS. It is clear, concise and relevant to all the current changes in healthcare provision. All those responsible for delivering a service based on clinical and cost effectiveness will find it essential reading. 'In the United Kingdom primary health care is based almost wholly on general practice. From April 1999 all general practices will belong to primary care groups. Questions of quality and accountability will be high on their agenda as part of the new arrangements for clinical governance. This book on accreditation in primary care is therefore most timely.' Sir Donald Irvine, President, General Medical Council, in the Introduction.

Through ninety-five in-depth interviews with primary care physicians (PCPs) working in different settings, as well as medical students and residents, Practice Under Pressure provides rich insight into the everyday lives of generalist physicians in the early twenty-first centuryùtheir work, stresses, hopes, expectations, and values. Timothy Hoff supports this dialogue with secondary data, statistics, and in-depth comparisons that capture the changing face of primary care medicineùlarger numbers of younger, female, and foreign-born physicians.

This APHA bestseller offers a complete set of community-oriented primary care skills for health professionals who need to access these skills quickly and learn the basics in a brief amount of time. It provides a broad view of experiences and processes faced by health professionals and community leaders in addressing a series of health problems for their defined populations. This book provides a complete set of COPC skills for the health professional who needs to be able to access these skills quickly and learn the basics of COPC in a brief amount of reading time.

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

The anthrax incidents following the 9/11 terrorist attacks put the spotlight on the nation's public health agencies, placing it under an unprecedented scrutiny that added new dimensions to the complex issues considered in this report. The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century reaffirms the vision of Healthy People 2010, and outlines a systems approach to assuring the nation's health in practice, research, and policy. This approach focuses on joining the unique resources and perspectives of diverse sectors and entities and challenges these groups to work in a concerted, strategic way to promote and protect the public's health. Focusing on diverse partnerships as the framework for public health, the book discusses: The need for a shift from an individual to a population-based approach in practice, research, policy, and community engagement. The status of the governmental public health infrastructure and what needs to be improved, including its interface with the health care delivery system. The roles nongovernment actors, such as academia, business, local communities and the media can play in creating a healthy nation. Providing an accessible analysis, this book will be important to public health policy-makers and practitioners, business and community leaders, health advocates, educators and journalists.

With family doctors increasingly overburdened, bureaucratized, and burned out, how can the field change before it's too late? Over the past few decades, as American medical practice has become increasingly specialized, the number of generalists—doctors who care for the whole person—has plummeted. On paper, family medicine sounds noble; in practice, though, the field is so demanding in scope and substance, and the health system so favorable to specialists, that it cannot be fulfilled by most doctors. In Searching for the Family Doctor, Timothy J. Hoff weaves together the early history of the family practice specialty in the United States with the personal narratives of modern-day family doctors. By formalizing this area of practice and instituting specialist-level training requirements, the originators of family practice hoped to increase respect for generalists, improve the pipeline of young medical graduates choosing primary care, and, in so doing, have a major positive impact on the way patients receive care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty-five family doctors, Hoff shows us how these medical professionals have had their calling transformed not only by the indifferent acts of an unsupportive health care system but by the hand of their own medical specialty—a specialty that has chosen to pursue short- over long-term viability, conformity over uniqueness, and protectionism over collaboration. A specialty unable to innovate to keep its membership cohesive and focused on fulfilling the generalist ideal. The family doctor, Hoff explains, was conceived of as a powered-up version of the "country doctor" idea. At a time when doctor-patient relationships are evaporating in the face of highly transactional, fast-food-style medical practice, this ideal seems both nostalgic and revolutionary. However, the realities of highly bureaucratic reimbursement and quality-of-care requirements, educational debt, and ongoing consolidation of the old-fashioned independent doctor's office into corporate health systems have stacked the deck against the altruists and true believers who are drawn to the profession of family practice. As more family doctors wind up working for big health care corporations, their career paths grow more parochial, balkanizing the specialty. Their work roles and professional identities are increasingly niche-oriented. Exploring how to save primary care by giving family doctors a fighting chance to become the generalists we need in our lives, Searching for the Family Doctor is required reading for anyone interested in the troubled state of modern medicine.

Marketing Health Care Into the Twenty-First Century explores recent and anticipated changes and trends--legislative, economic, organizational, clinical, and operational--from a strategic marketing perspective. Author Alan K. Vitberg, a respected consultant in health care marketing, takes an unabashedly strong, direct, and aggressive perspective on these trends, maintaining that a state of war exists in the health care industry--a war that will only increase in fervor and intensity as organizations fight for survival and their share of hundreds of billions of dollars spent in America on health care. According to Marketing Health Care Into the Twenty-First Century, those payers and providers who understand that they're fighting a war and act accordingly stand the best chance of short term survival and long term prosperity. Those who bury their heads in the sand, awaiting the storm of war to blow over, will find themselves prisoners of their inactivity. Marketing Health Care Into the Twenty-First Century succinctly captures and explores issues and trends affecting participants in the battle for consumers’health care dollars, including: the growth of managed care; emerging health care systems; formation of provider networks and other organizational structures; the relationship between risk and product, target market, and organizational options; the emerging clout of primary care; mergers and acquisitions; and shifts in health care dollar flow. Marketing Health Care Into the Twenty-First Century is also one of the first books in the market examining changes being made to Medicare and Medicaid programs and their strategic and tactical implications for health care industry participants. In order to take advantage of these changes and trends, Vitberg moves from the conceptual to the practical by defining and delivering insights into the concept of competitive innovation and its relationship to competitive advantage--hearing, listening, and responding to the voice of the market through meaning brand identification, product differentiation, and intrusive marketing communications that motivate customers to a preferential purchase decision. Anyone in the health care industry--marketing, planning, and development professionals with hospitals, HMOs, PPOs, networks/alliances, insurance companies, and medical groups--is among those who will find Marketing Health Care Into the Twenty-First Century a valuable resource for embracing strategic marketing now and in the near future. The book also serves as informative, stimulating reading for professors and students in graduate level health care administration courses.